Felting free-for-all.

 

 

      The fun continues! Long overdue, I visited a very good friend this past weekend. Elaine is also an artist and also in every media you can imagine. I think the thing that binds us other than our 35 years of laughter and tears and yummy food and wine, is the creative longing in each of us and our love of exploring the next new thing. She is probably the most "travelled" of the two of us in terms of researching and then executing new techniques, new media, new materials. The "longing" part comes with the frustrating desire that even if there we ten of us we would never have time to do ALL the things we want to do...
   
      Home again, This morning I wrestled with my camera and computer to again enable the access to my own photos for the blog,...and SUCCESS!! Without further ado, I want to share the few little things I've created with this new and exciting medium. First off, to exercise my pokey fingers, I endeavored to embellish,..and mend an old lambswool sweater...the bigger bits like the hearts are repairing little holes. This sweater is the warmest ever and its great to have it patched up and cozy again...

When I finished I got wild and crazy and dyed raw wool included in the kit with various colors of sugarless Koolaid powder...an awesome experience as the wool slurped up every bit of the color and left clear water in the jar it soaked in. Just look at these colors,..in the absence of yellow Koolaid, I went digging in the pantry and tried turmeric..it made an awesome rich color.

                   

       After the excitement of having the wools turn out so well in their newly acquired awesome hues,I wanted to splash all that color on something. My closet has a stash of varied and sundry resources I keep just in case an inspiration comes along and I dug out some 12" squares of a blanket I had cut for blotting handmade paper back in the spring.  I just experimented with a kind of "hit and miss" needling of my colorful fleece on the pieces of blanket.  I 'm aiming for a colorful clutch purse...and here is what i have so far:

I'm trying to decide what to do with the closing flap...

      The next fun exercise was to try and sculpt. Bear in mind I have no clue what I'm doing. It's a wing and prayer. The next fun exercise was to try and sculpt. and after multiple stabbing and fleece springing everywhere, I made this little guy...who looks like a headless soccer player in this picture....      

      

Ichabod Feltman..

And now, although still incomplete, he presents himself as a dapper bucolic type who may acquire yet...some hair and a nice hat, some boots and horse or a little burro,..maybe a cow or something??...Time will tell!

 Has his head on straight but can't find his hat and boots..

       I will spend sometime learning the ropes. Since I'm literally just taking a stab at this, I promise that in my next blog I will collect some useful instructional sites and share them along with new pictures of these projects and whatever comes next...Happy trails folks!!!